Posted on 09/28/2021 5:16:25 AM PDT by Openurmind
That’s because it depended on the applications those computers were running. Many people had nothing to worry about. Anyone running Unix or Linux servers were for the most part fine. Apple Macintosh were similarly OK. Even many people on Windows PCs were going to be fine if their software had been updated, or didn’t hit certain hardware time calls.
The biggest issues came in medical, governments, financial, communication, industrial, and many power industries where IT infrastructure had just "growed" over decades and multiple layers of various language code co-existed on the systems, sharing data and especially manipulation of dates.
This was particularly a problem in financial institutions (calculation of interest?) and telecommunications (mixing of analog and digital) where the mix of technology was truly arcane. In financial, some systems were so hog bound they were tied to a two digit year, not having conceived the necessity of moving into a new millennium, with programmers thinking the problem would be solved long before the time it would be a pressing matter, but budgets were never allocated to address it. In medical, birth years were also often recorded as double digit data because humans can interpolate the correct century, but computers are not capable of doing that without more objective data. Even the Social Security Administration was not prepared to handle people already born in 1900 and those going to be born in 2000 for this reason. They’d already been running into problems with still living persons born in the 1880s and new registrants born in the 1980s. Bad programming had not prepared for the data collisions of the future because the original programmers with limited data space figured their future colleagues would fix the problems when space became less of a problem, but they did not.
All of these issues had to be reconciled to prevent massive data loss… some of those data could have been catastrophic.
"...The software put that bogus date in every place on the contracts, registration, bill of sale, etc… and there’s a mandatory FINE assessed by DMV for every single error on those documents, regardless of why they were made, including typos..."
I guarantee-GUARANTEE-that if the DMV made some error that exposed the Social Security Number or Credit Card data on a million people, not one damn swinging dick would even get a slap on the wrist.
I work in healthcare, and have seen this dynamic with my own eyes. Laws for THEE but not for ME. Boy, does that piss me off.
Because if something like that happened, you KNOW they would fine anyone down to the last cent in their coffers.
That is why many Federal/State/Local governing agencies and those who are employed by them are regarded as bottom-feeding scum by normal hard working people.
Nice, and an interesting solution. :-)
We have this stuff in modern military weapons we ‘sell’ to foreign powers so they don’t come back to bite us.
Did you give the Mint a shot yet?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.